Life @F-L-O-W

In Mike Jay’s ground-breaking book @F-L-O-W, published in 2012, after a decade of global research, he outlined a simple strategy to begin to help you decelerate your wants, shifting you back to needs that lead to a deeper and more profound pursuit of happiness.

Mike’s gambit @F-L-O-W is simple.

With impending limits to growth created by exponential scale in population, use of water, energy, and food, looming with potentially severe consequences, Mike looked beyond what most see are the limits of our current system and devised a simple way for people to become part of the solution, and less a part of the problem.

While simple, it’s not easy.

No use trying to fool anyone, if it were easy, we all would be doing it now, and frankly Mike knows that he’s going to be pretty much alone in that people change the only thing they can…and that is themselves.

Our world has grown into a model where the buck stops somewhere else, and personal responsibility is abdicated to governments, banks, and financiers.  Yet, the axiom that only one person can change the world holds true @F-L-O-W and that person…is YOU.

Mike suggests a simple set of ideas to begin to decelerate consumption, which is driving the majority of issues looming today; whether it’s money and credit, food shortages, energy prices, clean water, roads, bridges, infrastructure, or disease…all of these issues are related directly or indirectly to consumption.

For many centuries, consumption was an engine that helped create demand, and demand fulfilled a necessary cog in the wheel for jobs.  Jobs led to income, increasing demand and therefore steadily increasing levels of production and consumption.

With continued finds and development of resources, the production possibility frontier—read simply as the sky’s the limit—continued to expand and grow, allowing more and more people to find dignified work, gainful employment and better lives.

Yet population continued to grow exponentially and the distance between the haves and the have-nots begin to be driven by more complex consumption, requiring more from us than we had to give.

As we approach the more complex issues and challenges in an accelerating array of multifaceted options, we are being called into the kinds of thinking that most of us just are not capable of matching.

In simpler words, we are in over our heads, and becoming more so.

Robert Kegan’s book in the mid-nineties suggested:

“The expectations upon us…demand something more than mere behavior, the acquisition of specific skills, or the mastery of particular knowledge.  They make demands on our minds, on how we know, on the complexity of our consciousness” (Kegan, 1994, p. 5). 

 It’s not good or bad, lest thinking makes it so.

But what it is…

Is challenging us to solve problems and actually…

Choose problems that are the problems we can solve.

Enter @F-L-O-W

Mike’s ideas are multifaceted and involve several simple, yet counter-intuitive concepts:

• We are not equal
• Sameness is not fairness
• We are not broken, and
• Increasing our choices is probably leading to decreasing levels of happiness.

These TALKING POINTS @F-L-O-W were created by Mike as a challenge to our current BLANK SLATE paradigm, as a contrast to:

• Let’s not keep pretending we are equal
• However, we
• However, we deserve the same treatments
• Each of us is perfect in diverse ways, and
• Learning to use needs instead of wants to drive choices leads to increasing levels of happiness.

These and other key talking points are offered as a gift to you by our team when you join our Movement @F-L-O-W, and register for a special program Mike is offering to participants.

LIFE @F-L-O-W

In this four session program, Mike will walk you through the specific steps you can take to create these benefits for you and your family, work, and relationships:

1. Identify those things you are doing now that seem to be things you need to change?
2. Instead of changing them, learn why they are developing as issues.
3. Understand a different meaning of what it means to live life on purpose.
4. Discover very specific ways in which you can become more competent @F-L-O-W.
5. Begin to automatically decelerate the need for more:
• Money
• Information
• Time
• Energy
• Attention
• Motivation

Here’s the bottom line.

LESS IS MORE!

In order to begin to give yourself more, not less choice, but need fewer choices, less becomes more.

Now, the first thing you will think is that this is about an austerity program, seemingly so much on the minds of all of us after our spending binges and use of money and credit for the past 60 years.  It’s not about that at all.

These are only symptoms of a deeper, more profound need for happiness brought about by the world that we have lived in, and our ego-needs to thrive, flourish, and belong.

It’s not bad, it just is…

AND, the consequences are looming in front of us individually and collectively.

Life for many has NEVER been better.

Even poor people today are making their first cell phone calls, enjoying the benefits of connectivity and receiving in many cases life-saving therapies and medicines.

I’m not suggesting we throw the baby out with the bathwater or abandon modern day society and progressivity per se.

What I am saying is this:

The pressure that is being applied in modern day living to maintain your edge is increasing dramatically, and the compression of time because of the pace of change is creating an illusion that we are not prepared to manage.

Fewer and fewer people will be able to manage the postmodern landscape, leaving—each day—more and more people behind to pick up the pieces.  This is a fact in the developed world that each and every citizen is facing.

You see, we are not good at, nor equipped to deal with postmodern exponential scale, growth, or complexity.  We’ve stretched our systems and capabilities beyond our limits and yet…progress continues in all its glory, sorting out quickly those with the capability to manage these steeper and steeper transitions in life’s challenges.

While on the surface, we appear as ducks on a pond, such that things are coming at us faster and faster and we’re paddling like hell underneath it all to even assimilate the simplest changes in volume of Money, Information, Time, Energy, Attention, and Motivation—all of which are strained in all of us in the postmodern climate of accelerating complexity.

For most of you, this will sound like a familiar, but distant message.

You know it’s happening, but the effects are not here yet…

But they are coming, and they are coming faster and faster and like Alice talking to the Red Queen, you’re running faster and faster, yet not able to get ahead, or in most cases, even keep up.

Have you tried to keep up with the interesting books being published lately, the research available in your field, or even the articles published this past week in your industry journals?

We’re just touching the surface and as complexity accelerates exponentially, choices scale non-linearly, life is becoming our best guess, at best, and more and more tragic at the worst.

LIFE @F-L-O-W

After subjecting my own system to global demands for a decade, along with clients from around the world, I realize that finding a faster bike to pedal became a gambit I couldn’t sustain, and neither can you.

No amount of increased speed can help us now.

No “getting-things-done program”, no efficiency system, faster laptops, more training in speed reading…all of those things are lost in exponential worlds, we have limits and clearly we’re being asked to exceed them daily, all of which is contributing to more, not less, and fleeting moments of flow, not alone happiness.

All for success, and the hits just keep happening, right?

Living @F-L-O-W was vetted for more than a decade around the world in diverse cultures and the answers always came up the same:

• Know your self and what you really need.
• Understand your limits, live out of your talents
• Decelerate want-based consumption.
• Collaborate with others to solve more complex problems.

Simple Right?

Easy?

Not in our present culture of more.

While it’s time to close this note and encourage you to register for Mike’s upcoming program LIVING @F-L-O-W, know that you are not alone.

What’s occurred has not been out of mal-intent or some Machiavellian scheme. It was the use of what we thought worked best for the times.

NOW, is not the time to point fingers, to assign blame and to create discord; and dare I say, now is a time to love yourself and others, but as is said in a notable quote from Mohammed:

"Tie your camel first, then pray to god."

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and the world can be changed by only one person and you are staring at her/him in the mirror.

If you do NOTHING else in 2013, experience the simple notions of deepening your understanding of what you really need in your life to be on purpose…change will emerge from that.

For a guided process in self-illumination, join Mike Jay for
Life @F-L-O-W, and become part of the solution, rather than
part of the problem.

Class begins June 6th and continues each Thursday in June, beginning at 8:30 PM ET.  All calls will be recorded and available in your member’s area.

To register for the $97 live and recorded program, click below:

Team @F-L-O-W

PS: In order to join our MOVEMENT @F-L-O-W and get immediate access to Mike’s Talking Points, Teachable Points of View, and the Faststart @F-L-O-W, purchase the Book @F-L-O-W.

PPS: NOTE – The admission to the course goes up to $127 on May 27th.